New Orleans did not invent the word brunch.
It may have invented the meal before anybody knew what to call it.
Beginning in 1863, Elizabeth Kettenring Dutreuil Bégué served an unusual late-morning meal from a tiny restaurant across from the French Market.
It started around 11 a.m.
It could last for hours.
There were eggs.
Meat.
Seafood.
Creole dishes.
Coffee.
Wine.
Plenty of wine.
The meal was originally created for market butchers who had already worked most of a day before many New Orleanians had finished breakfast.
Madame Bégué called it second breakfast.
Her customers called it the butcher’s breakfast.
Today, the Historic New Orleans Collection describes Bégué as widely credited as the mother of brunch. She had been serving her version for more than three decades before British writer Guy Beringer published the 1895 essay generally credited with popularizing the actual word brunch.
New Orleans had the meal first.
The vocabulary caught up later.
She Was Born Elizabeth Kettenring
Madame Bégué was born Elizabeth Kettenring in Bavaria in 1831.
At about twenty-two years old, she immigrated to New Orleans in 1853, following her brother Philip, who had already established himself as a butcher in the French Market.
The French Market was not simply a tourist attraction in those days.
It was a working commercial center.
Meat sellers.
Produce vendors.
Fish merchants.
Dockworkers.
Laborers.
Customers.
The surrounding streets were filled with people whose schedules followed the market rather than the conventional working day.
Through that community, Elizabeth met Louis Dutreuil, a butcher from the Gascony region of France.
They married.
And eventually, food and the market would become the foundation of their business.
The Butchers Started Work Before Dawn
French Market butchers lived on a schedule almost upside down from everyone else’s.
Their work could begin as early as 2 a.m.
Before starting, they might have little more than French bread and coffee.
Then came hours of physically demanding work cutting and selling meat.
By late morning, when market business slowed, those workers were hungry enough for something much more substantial than another cup of coffee.
Madame Bégué recognized the opportunity.
She did not decide to open an ordinary breakfast restaurant.
She built a meal around the schedule of the people working across the street.
That decision helped create one of New Orleans’ defining dining traditions.
The Restaurant Opened in 1863
In 1863, Elizabeth and Louis Dutreuil opened a saloon and café at 207 Old Levée Street, now 823 Decatur Street, near Madison Street and directly across from the French Market.
The business became known as Dutrey’s Coffee Exchange, an Anglicized version of the Dutreuil name.
Louis managed the bar.
Elizabeth controlled the kitchen.
And the restaurant followed an unusual schedule.
Food service ran essentially from 11 a.m. until about 3 p.m.
There was no conventional breakfast.
No dinner.
Just one enormous meal in the middle of the day.
Madame Bégué Called It “Second Breakfast”
The concept had roots in Bégué’s German background.
In Bavaria, zweites Frühstück, or second breakfast, traditionally referred to a light midmorning meal that might include coffee, sausage, pretzels, and beer.
Madame Bégué took that idea and adapted it to the appetite of French Market workers.
Her version was anything but light.
Instead of a snack between breakfast and lunch, she served a six- or seven-course meal combining foods associated with breakfast and heavier dishes that would normally belong to dinner.
Fruit.
Eggs.
Toast.
Meat.
Seafood.
Creole dishes.
Coffee.
Wine.
Other alcoholic drinks.
The butchers had already been working for hours.
Madame Bégué fed them accordingly.
This Was Brunch Before “Brunch”
The word brunch did not become widely known until later.
British writer Guy Beringer published an essay titled Brunch: A Plea in 1895 proposing a leisurely late-morning Sunday meal that would combine breakfast and lunch and allow people to sleep later after Saturday-night socializing.
Bégué had been serving her second breakfast since 1863.
Thirty-two years earlier.
Interestingly, the two meals developed for almost opposite reasons.
Beringer’s brunch was partly designed for people who wanted to sleep late.
Bégué’s meal was designed for people who had already been awake and working since before dawn.
Same general dining window.
Completely different alarm clocks.
The Original Customers Were Working Men
Modern brunch can bring to mind champagne, linen napkins, eggs Benedict, and people discussing whether noon is too early for cocktails.
Bégué’s original restaurant was considerably rougher.
The dining room was small.
The early clientele consisted largely of market butchers and laborers.
Many arrived in their work clothes.
The restaurant did not initially bother with the formal table linens that later became associated with upscale dining.
Customers descended a narrow staircase into a room designed to feed workers, not impress tourists.
The famous New Orleans brunch tradition therefore did not begin as luxury dining.
It began as worker food.
Her First Husband Died in 1875
Louis Dutreuil died in 1875.
Elizabeth continued operating the restaurant as a widow.
Then one of the restaurant’s enthusiastic regular customers entered the story.
Hippolyte Bégué was another French immigrant who had become a French Market butcher.
He liked the restaurant enough that in 1877 he left butchering and began working there as a bartender.
Three years later, in 1880, he married Elizabeth.
The restaurant became H. Bégué’s Exchange.
New Orleans shortened that to Bégué’s.
Elizabeth Dutreuil became the woman history remembers as:
Madame Bégué.
Tourists Discovered Her During the 1884 World’s Fair
The turning point came during the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition, held in New Orleans beginning in 1884.
Visitors poured into the city.
Some found their way to Madame Bégué’s strange little restaurant beside the market.
They encountered something they had not expected:
A tremendous multicourse meal beginning at 11 in the morning.
Word spread.
Travelers began writing about it.
Newspaper accounts appeared around the country.
What had started as a practical meal for butchers became a New Orleans attraction.
The World’s Fair itself struggled financially.
Madame Bégué did considerably better.
The Tourists Eventually Displaced the Butchers
Success changed the restaurant.
Writers.
Artists.
Tourists.
Businesspeople.
Society figures.
Women curious about the famous restaurant.
They began competing for seats at Bégué’s table.
The working-class butchers who had created the original demand gradually became a smaller part of the clientele.
The change did not initially delight the Bégués.
One contemporary account recalled that after women first began appearing at the restaurant, the couple resisted the shift.
But the visitors kept coming.
Eventually, the dining room changed with them.
Tablecloths appeared.
The atmosphere became more refined.
A workers’ meal became a tourist experience.
It would not be the last time New Orleans converted local working food into something visitors traveled across the country to experience.
Reservations Became Almost Impossible
Madame Bégué’s fame created another feature that modern brunch diners might recognize.
It became difficult to get a table.
Very difficult.
For most of her career, the restaurant revolved around a single shared table seating roughly thirty people.
Bégué resisted increasing capacity despite growing demand.
Reservations could be booked a week in advance and sometimes much longer.
Walk-ins were routinely turned away.
Near the end of her life, another dining area was finally added upstairs.
But for decades, part of the experience was simply getting in.
New Orleans brunch had acquired another enduring tradition:
The reservation problem.
Everybody Ate Together
The shared-table format also created a distinctive experience.
Customers were not necessarily seated privately with only their own party.
They ate around a communal table.
That made Bégué’s meal social almost automatically.
Wine flowed.
Courses kept arriving.
Strangers talked.
The meal stretched on.
Guests wrote poems and jokes afterward.
The visitor registers preserved by the Historic New Orleans Collection are filled with reactions from diners who found themselves both impressed and physically overwhelmed by the amount of food.
Bégué was not simply feeding people.
She had created an event.
Guests Started Writing Poetry About Breakfast
The Bégués maintained guest registers where diners recorded their impressions.
Some wrote poems.
Others drew cartoons.
Many joked about how impossibly full they had become.
One of the best-known entries came from writer Eugene Field, whose couplet celebrating his March 11, 1895, breakfast at Bégué’s was later used in the restaurant cookbook.
The registers became attractions themselves.
Newspapers quoted them.
The restaurant’s 1900 cookbook reproduced pages from them.
Visitors wanted not only to eat the meal but also to leave evidence that they had survived it.
Long before restaurants had social media walls filled with customer photos, Bégué’s had a nineteenth-century version.
Ink.
Poetry.
And indigestion.
What Did Madame Bégué Cook?
Her menu was deeply connected to Creole New Orleans.
Among the dishes documented at or associated with Bégué’s were:
Gumbo.
Jambalaya.
Turtle soup.
Courtbouillon.
Crawfish.
Omelets.
Liver à la Bégué.
Her cooking was influenced by several traditions.
She arrived with a foundation in German cooking.
Her first husband and many of the market butchers came from Gascony in southwestern France.
Then she absorbed the cooking traditions of New Orleans.
The result became firmly identified as Creole cuisine.
Her 1900 cookbook was explicitly presented as Old Creole Cookery. The Library of Congress preserves a copy containing recipes in both French and English.
Omelets Were an Everyday Part of Bégué’s Breakfast
One feature of her menus sounds remarkably modern.
There was often an omelet.
But these were not necessarily simple cheese omelets.
Bégué’s omelets could contain:
Oysters.
Veal.
Potatoes.
Other substantial ingredients.
Historian Rien Fertel has connected that tradition with Gascony, the home region of many French Market butchers, where egg dishes could contain hearty meats rather than functioning merely as light breakfast fare.
This is another place where the connection to modern brunch becomes obvious.
Eggs formed a bridge.
Breakfast food could carry ingredients substantial enough for lunch.
Bégué was doing that in the nineteenth century.
Liver à la Bégué Became Her Signature
One of Madame Bégué’s most famous specialties was Liver à la Bégué.
The dish reflected her preference for hearty preparations suited to her original butcher clientele.
It is also an important reminder that nineteenth-century diners did not necessarily think of brunch as pancakes, pastries, and sweet cocktails.
Bégué’s table was serious eating.
Organ meats.
Seafood.
Rich sauces.
Egg dishes.
Meat.
Wine.
The meal was designed for people with enormous appetites.
Even when tourists replaced many of the workers, the abundance remained.
Crawfish Confused Visitors Even Then
Out-of-town diners did not always know what to do with New Orleans food.
Crawfish were one example.
Contemporary accounts describe Monsieur Bégué showing visitors how to peel them.
He would remove the head and open the shell while explaining the process.
The scene feels almost timeless.
A visitor arrives in Louisiana.
Crawfish appear.
The visitor studies the plate.
A local realizes help is needed.
More than a century later, Louisiana is still conducting the same orientation program.
Café Brûlot Signaled the End
Bégué’s giant meal eventually reached its conclusion with another New Orleans classic:
café brûlot.
The spiced coffee-and-cognac preparation became a recognizable finishing point for the long breakfast.
That detail helps show how thoroughly the meal had departed from ordinary breakfast.
Coffee remained.
But now the coffee arrived with cognac after multiple courses and wine.
Breakfast had essentially swallowed lunch and started negotiating with dinner.
Her Cookbook Appeared in 1900
Madame Bégué became famous enough that her recipes were published while she was still alive.
Mme. Bégué and Her Recipes: Old Creole Cookery appeared in 1900.
Interestingly, it was published by the Southern Pacific Railroad’s Sunset Route, which was promoting travel to New Orleans.
The cookbook included biographical material, descriptions of the restaurant, selections from its famous registers, and Bégué’s recipes presented in French and English.
That publishing arrangement reveals how important food had already become to New Orleans tourism.
Railroads were not merely advertising transportation.
They were advertising what travelers could eat when they arrived.
Madame Bégué was part of the sales pitch.
She Became One of New Orleans’ Early Celebrity Chefs
Her fame eventually extended far beyond the French Market.
Newspapers across the United States wrote about her.
Tourists knew her name before arriving.
Visitors sought reservations specifically because they wanted to eat food prepared by Madame Bégué.
Her dining room became an attraction.
Her recipes became a book.
Her photograph circulated.
Her personality became part of the restaurant’s appeal.
When she died, newspapers outside Louisiana reported the news.
That makes Bégué one of New Orleans’ earliest recognizable celebrity chefs.
She did not have television.
She had newspapers, railroads, tourists, and word of mouth.
The system worked remarkably well.
Rheumatism Eventually Forced Her Away from the Stove
By the early twentieth century, Bégué’s health was declining.
Rheumatism affected her hands badly enough that by 1903 she could no longer continue the demanding daily cooking schedule that had defined her career.
She shifted into a supervisory role.
Later she needed crutches.
Near the end of her life, she spent much of her time seated in the dining room while still greeting customers.
The restaurant continued around her.
Guests still came partly to see the woman who had made the place famous.
Madame Bégué Died in 1906
Elizabeth Bégué died on October 19, 1906, at age seventy-five, in her room above the restaurant.
Her obituary in the Times-Democrat remembered not only her cooking but her personality and hospitality.
She had become a New Orleans character in the best sense of the phrase.
People remembered the steak.
The salads.
The omelets.
But they also remembered Madame herself.
That matters.
Restaurants become institutions because diners form emotional attachments to the people inside them.
Bégué understood hospitality long before the industry turned it into a management term.
The Restaurant Continued After Her Death
Hippolyte Bégué kept the restaurant operating after his wife’s death.
He later married Françoise “Frances” Laporte, who had apprenticed under Madame Bégué and took charge of the kitchen.
The second Madame Bégué made one notable change.
She added dinner.
The original Madame Bégué had spent more than forty years essentially serving one meal:
That enormous late-morning breakfast.
That consistency makes her legacy even clearer.
Brunch was not an occasional promotion.
It was the entire restaurant.
Tujague’s Eventually Absorbed Bégué’s
In 1914, Bégué’s was purchased by neighboring Tujague’s, another historic French Market restaurant.
Tujague’s moved into Bégué’s building at 823 Decatur and continued acknowledging the butcher’s-breakfast tradition associated with the location.
Tujague’s itself had long served market workers and later promoted its own butcher’s breakfast.
The restaurant remained in the former Bégué location until 2020.
So even after the original restaurant disappeared as an independent business, the physical site continued feeding people for more than a century.
The brunch story never completely left the block.
Did Madame Bégué Really Invent Brunch?
This requires a careful answer.
She did not invent the word.
She did not create every historical example of people eating a late-morning meal.
And other cultures had long traditions of second breakfasts and meals that blurred conventional dining hours.
But Bégué unquestionably created an unusually elaborate, restaurant-based late-morning meal in New Orleans beginning in 1863.
It combined breakfast foods with substantial lunch and dinner dishes.
It included alcohol.
It was social.
It lasted for hours.
It attracted tourists specifically for the experience.
And it became nationally famous decades before brunch emerged as a mainstream American restaurant category.
Calling Madame Bégué the mother of New Orleans brunch therefore captures something historically real, provided we understand what the claim means.
She created a recognizable ancestor of the modern New Orleans brunch experience.
New Orleans Brunch Became Something Bigger
Later New Orleans restaurants would build on the idea in their own ways.
Brennan’s developed its elaborate Breakfast at Brennan’s tradition.
Commander’s Palace made jazz brunch famous.
Restaurants throughout the city turned Sunday brunch into an institution involving cocktails, eggs, seafood, music, and long meals.
But the underlying idea would have looked familiar to Madame Bégué:
Do not rush.
Serve plenty of food.
Let breakfast and lunch overlap.
Pour something stronger than coffee.
Make the meal social.
And give people enough time to enjoy themselves.
The modern menus changed.
The basic New Orleans philosophy did not.
Brunch Began as a Worker’s Meal
Perhaps the most important part of Madame Bégué’s story is the part easiest to lose.
The famous meal did not begin as entertainment for wealthy tourists.
It began because working men were hungry.
French Market butchers had already completed hours of hard labor by 11 in the morning.
Madame Bégué saw them.
She understood their schedule.
And she fed them the meal they actually needed.
Only later did tourists discover it.
Only later did journalists romanticize it.
Only later did reservations become difficult and tablecloths appear.
That path—from working food to celebrated New Orleans tradition—appears repeatedly in Louisiana culinary history.
The food starts with necessity.
Then somebody realizes how good it is.
The Woman Behind New Orleans’ Longest Breakfast
Madame Bégué never called her meal brunch.
She called it breakfast.
Second breakfast.
The butchers had another name for it.
And decades later, the rest of the world finally developed vocabulary for what she had been doing all along.
Elizabeth Kettenring arrived in New Orleans from Bavaria in 1853.
Ten years later, she was cooking beside the French Market.
For more than four decades, she served essentially one enormous daily meal beginning around 11 a.m.
Workers came first.
Then tourists.
Then writers.
Then celebrities.
They ate omelets, gumbo, crawfish, meat, seafood, and whatever else Madame decided belonged on the table.
They drank wine.
They finished with coffee and cognac.
And they stayed for hours.
Today, brunch is so common that it can feel as though restaurants have always served breakfast and lunch together.
They have not.
But in New Orleans, Madame Bégué was already showing everyone how it could be done in 1863.
The word came later.
The meal was already on the table.
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